Sales and Marketing Performance Blog

2010 CSO Insights Survey: I Want Inbound Leads, Marketing Alignment

CSO Insights * yesterday released their 16th. Sales Performance Optimization Survey of more than 2800 Chief Sales Officers (CSO's) around the World from many different industries.

The top 5 initiatives for Chief Sales Officers in the software business in 2010, with a survey sample of more than 320 respondents, are as follows:-

1. Sales leaders want to revise lead generation
2. They want closer alignment with marketing
3. They plan to revise team structure
   
4. They want a better understanding of the buying process
   
5. They also want to provide better Rep access to information
6. They plan to revise the sales process

How does this top 5 ranking compare with your top 5 priorities for 2010?

What I distill from this chart and what differs from last year is that CSO's are looking for an edge in lead generation and conversion into sales opportunities. Lead generation was on top last year as well, but sales and marketing alignment has moved up from third to second priority. I believe the methods are now clearly defined - such that I can confidently say that the best practices for increasing lead generation and conversion into opportunities are to;

1. Align Sales and Marketing Messaging around the Buyer-Persona to create Buyer-Relevant-Messaging to drive Inbound Marketing campaigns and elevate the standard of sales conversations around how products/services are used to solve buyer issues. This is a first step in an Inbound Marketing - Sequence of Events as it creates buyer-relevance for Inbound Marketing Initiatives.

  2. Implement Inbound Marketing to cost-effectively generate 5-10X leads in the first 6 months of implementation: HubSpot has defined the Inbound Marketing platform and process and they are rapidly gaining momentum with an integrated set of tools, enabling closer cooperation between sales and marketing to orchestrate the lead generation, lead-scoring, lead-nurturing and hand-over process.

3. Sales leaders are recognising the need for inbound sales/sales operations to qualify and respond to inbound inquiries within an hour of visiting the Website. We know from InsideSales.com that a sales lead is 100X more likely to engage in a conversation with a salesperson and become an opportunity if they are contacted within one hour of converting into a lead (by opting-in to providing their contact details in response to an offer). 

4.  Analyzing the customer buying process may not drive inbound leads, but aligning with the way customers buy (determined by product/market maturity and buyer risk tolerance) will reduce cost of sale and help sales managers to decide when to qualify out of deals that are likely to end in a loss or no-decision. 

All purchasing decisions go the though the IMPACT cycle.

In the technology business, being out of alignment with how the customer buys can kill a start-up company before it gets off the ground. Similarly the wrong engagement model can drain profit through over-servicing transactional or value-added buyers.

The Value-Created Selling model adapted from the book, Why Killer Products Don't Sell, by Dominic Rowsell and Ian Gotts, shown in the drawing below is how discontinuous technology is sold to early adopters; how consulting firms sell and how the very best sales people sell consultatively in large coporations to influence new project initiation.

 

The Value- Created Selling Model

5. The sales process is by definition an attempt to introduce order and science into selling cycles to create efficiency and performance metrics and as such will always be a top 5 initiative as products, companies, markets and buyers evolve.

6. Equal 5th place was creating sales knowledge. Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment goes a long way in capturing relevant knowledge and sharing it across customer-facing teams. Buyer-relevant messaging templates integrate the following:

• Industry knowledge about target buyer goals, industry issues and pressure buyers are under
  
• Product-usage knowledge around capabilities relevant to achieving buyer goals/ satisfying needs
• Best-practices diagnostic questions and buyer-vision questions
• Proof points of relevant successes that are accessible and clear
• Narrative summaries of unique capabilities and tools that integrate capabilities into sales calls and formal correspondence

The above concepts are captured and available for instant download in our white paper, "Converting inbound lead generation into better sales performance"

 

* http://www.csoinsights.com

Messaging Alignment is Essential to Inbound Marketing Strategy

Most marketing executives will have lead generation close to the top of their list of goals in 2010; however generating quality sales leads has never been harder, or easier - depending on your strategy.

Careful consideration of a lead generation strategy for 2010 will reduce risk of the following; weak lead flow, poor quality leads, sales blaming marketing, sales doing lead generation, products failing to achieve potential, getting fired, fund-raising challenges, getting sold under-value, and finally running out of cash and corporate death.

How can Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment help?

• By identifying buyer-persona goals, problems, and relevant issues, we can connect buyers to how products are used to create value. Creating remarkable online content that conveys clear messaging around relevant capabilities and appropriate keywords will help you get found on the Internet, engage buyer persona's and increase inbound lead-flow.
• Creating one message and set of sales tools that can be reused across the company by sales and marketing, in the Internet site, blogs, .pdf's, white-papers and in sales conversations; creates clarity, congruence and amplifies the message.
• Capturing proof points or evidence of client success and integrating them into marketing material and sales conversation establishes credibility and believability.

How do you rate your own messaging?

1. How well do you think your messaging connects with buyer needs?
2. Do you have any issues with multiple messages in use across the business - is the sales team all presenting the same message or are they wasting time and effort making up their own presentations?
3. Are your customer success stories all documented and  structured around value-creation capabilities. Are they readily available to your prospects and clearly understood by direct and channel sales teams?
   

The following client-brief discusses how Messaging Alignment and Inbound Marketing strategy work together.

An AMC client announced a new product to supplement existing offerings and wanted to generate leads and market buzz around their product. The company website, like that of many technology companies, was highly product-centric and traditional marketing techniques and PR placements were ineffective; they tried Pay Per Click campaigns, but generated few inbound leads.

We were engaged to help align sales and marketing messaging and improve sales performance.

Step 1 was to conduct a Sales and Marketing Alignment Workshop, where we brainstormed and developed the following messaging structure.

• Buyer persona goals, needs and issues identified,
• Product and company capabilities were matched against buyer goals/needs in Buyer-Relevant Messaging Templates,
• Best-practices diagnostic questions and buyer-vision questions were added to help sales people qualify the buyer and envision using the products,
• Capabilities were extracted from the templates to create a Messaging Architecture to drive Internet and collateral messaging.
  

Step 2 was to integrate the new messaging into the Website and collateral, transforming it from product-centric to customer/problem-centric.

Step 3 HubSpot was recommended for blogging, analytics and creating landing pages. The client began an Inbound Marketing strategy including blogging, webinars, social media integration, email campaigns and lead nurturing.

Step 4 we conducted our Selling in the Internet Age classroom sales training and Performance Support program to train the sales team to use the new messaging and develop consultative selling skills.

As a result of these combined efforts and a tremendous amount of work from the small marketing team, the client is generating hundreds of new high quality leads per month and achieving Google front page rankings for many of their keywords.

In Summary:

 

Marketers wishing to improve lead generation should aim to develop messaging that is buyer-relevant and structured around how products are used to create value. By integrating proof points that support relevant capabilities into the messaging structure, along with solution summaries that capture the nature of the buyers problem, resolution and value; marketers are able to create a maintainable messaging architecture for use across the company and with partners, that adapts with feedback over time and drives Inbound Marketing lead generation strategy.

Please register for our Webinar with HubSpot on Monday 25th January 2010, to learn how to help clients generate more leads & close more sales by offering inbound marketing and sales and marketing alignment services. In this webinar, Marketing and PR agencies will learn how to offer services that help clients:

• 

  Align sales and marketing messaging
• Set lead generation service level agreements for their marketing teams. 
• Establish systems that helps marketing teams increase sales productivity. 
• Establish reporting systems for accountability.
• Establish feedback loops from sales, so marketing can improve impact of marketing activities on revenue growth
  

Clarity Trumps Persuasion and Drives Sales Conversations

Clarity in Internet, marketing and sales messaging is a topic we have been writing about for the past five years as it critical in creating marketing messages for B2B technology companies that resonate with buyers and help them get found on the Internet.

I watched the recent Marketing Experiments Webinar Clarity Trumps Persuasion, with interest as Marketing Experiments showed how small changes in a landing page to make the offer and value clearer, made a 200%+ change in conversion, (if you haven't seen it I recommend it and it can be found here). This is not surprising for a Pay Per Click (PPC) advert for a business to consumer (B2C) product, as creating landing pages that convert is a science in itself and Marketing Experiments are thought-leaders in this space.

The issue of clarity in messaging is critical for both marketers and sellers in the Internet age. Marketing Experiments quote as little as 3 seconds and 7 seconds as the maximum time a visitor will spend on a site if the visitor cannot figure out what the site is about and what's in it for me (WIIFM) to stick around. The questions visitors ask are as follows;

1. Where am I?
2. What can I do here?
3. Why should I do it with you?
   

In the B2B technology market, these questions are extremely important in site design, but they are a part of the larger problem of creating clarity in selling technology products. Clear messaging that aligns both sales and marketing around buyer needs, should be the goal of every company.

How does your Messaging rate?

• How many versions of the truth are circulating in your company? 
• Are sales people making up their own stuff because they cannot decipher the 30,000 foot messages from marketing? 
• How easy is it to figure out how your products/services create value?
• Does your Web-site product-speak (features and benefits) or does it speak to the needs of your customers and how they use your products and how your products create value?

Criteria for Clarity in Messaging for Technology Companies.

1. You can figure out what the company does in less than 5 seconds of landing on the site,
2. Buyer needs/goals/problems are identified,
3. Relevant product capabilities are clear, copy is well written, consistent across blogs, PR and white-papers
   
4. Value-creation and ROI are spelled out on the front page and every subsequent page and call to action,
5. If you use images, they must convey meaning - smiley faces are visual SPAM,
6. Proof-points, case-studies and other evidence criteria are accessible in a mouse-click,
7. Clear and compelling calls to action, (see Marketing Experiments presentation)
8. Technical features and benefits are accessible via a menu for those who need it in product spec. sheets or .pdf's, not on the main pages.
9. No "leading-edge, next-generation, or paradigm-shifting" Gobbledygook words anywhere in copy.  
10. Sales and reseller channels use the same messaging in verbal and written communication with buyers when engaging, qualifying, analyzing, proposing and evaluating products.

The process below is proven to create clarity in messaging, and congruence across the corporation.

To find out more about creating effective Internet Messaging to attract the right sort of visitors, you are invited to attend our Webinar with HubSpot on this subject.

HubSpot Inbound Marketing Performance Review - Year 1

We signed with Hubspot 12 months ago in December 2008 and chose to migrate our Website onto the HubSpot Owner (now Small Business) package, which uses the HubSpot CMS.

We are a specialist marketing consulting business helping companies to align sales and marketing messaging to generate leads & training customer-facing teams to elevate skills for selling in the internet age.

We contacted HubSpot after receiving a strong recommendation from one of our clients VICO Software in Boston, who had been using HubSpot for over a year and were achieiving outstanding results.

Our goals with HubSpot are to generate inbound leads and to grow awareness of our marketing and sales performance offerings in the markets we serve.

The situation prior to HubSpot was that we were doing poorly with Google Adwords; our old CMS had no social media integration, nor the ability for us to change any content. We had been placing articles in the Cambridge Network magazine and averaged about 100 unique visitors per month. We received only one inbound lead in the prior year.

What we learned

1. If you actively use HubSpot as a blogging and social media integration platform, HubSpot works as advertised. See our visitor chart below, showing inbound visits, repeat visits and lead conversion events.

   

2. The charts speak for themselves....you can't fudge the results.
3. We began climbing organic search rankings almost immediately, purely through blogging on a weekly basis.
   
4. We needed a conversion vehicle to capture interested visitors and added our professionally developed white-paper on 30th. September, (see spike on chart) and have been averaging about 12 inbound leads per month and will close our first new clients as a result of these leads in the next month.
5. White-papers create conversion opportunities, but they take time to write and they have to be high quality.
6. We engaged a professional, Stephanie Tilton from TenTon Marketing who did a fantastic job editing our white-paper, asking questions to help us focus our message and formatting it to produce a high quality product.
7. We used an idea from David Meerman-Scott, which was to give part of the white-paper content away with no registration required. The theory is that after spending 10-15 minutes reading part 1, sufficient trust is developed which motivates the visitor to complete a form (and become a lead) in order to download part 2.
8. When we started blogging we were a bit internally focused, but soon learned that people are interested in your ideas first and then make decisions about product/service, so focus blogging on ideas relevant to target buyer buyer-persona, not on your products or services.
   
9. Blogging takes time and in my case requires intellectual effort and must be posted at least weekly; link blogging is quicker and also effective in getting inbound visitors initially, see chart blog subscribers.

What we like about Hubspot is the Integration of keywords, blogging, social media, analytics, SEO, landing pages, keyword grader, link grader and page optimization wizards and CMS on one easy to use platform which gives us tremendous productivity at low cost.

• HubSpot provides quality support and every time we have had a problem have gotten an answer within a couple of minutes.
• HubSpot forums are rich and useful and the 2000+ HubSpot customers provide a tremendous resource base of expertise very willing to help answer questions.
• Finally we love the fact that we can do it ourselves, see and analyze the results, make the changes and watch it grow.
  

We became a HubSpot reseller partner as we believe HubSpot can solve the Inbound lead generation problem while at the same time creating mindshare and thought leadership for a large percentage of our clients who tend to be early stage technology companies or large companies with emerging technology products/services.

What were going to do differently in 2010

1. Set up lead nurturing within HubSpot....this requires thought and mutliple offerings to be effective.
2. Set up multiple conversion events including regular Webinars and an eBook.
3. Stronger and more obvious calls to action.
4. Redesign of the front page and restructure of content around our business focus for 2010 to make it easier to for visitors to understand how we create value.
5. Refine our focus on target markets and messaging, keywords and phrases for target markets
6. Engage our target buyers more actively through social media.

Top 5 Ranked Sales and Marketing Performance Blogs for 2009

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to my friends colleagues and fellow group members.

Here are the 5 top traffic ranked Sales and Marketing Performance Blogs posted on our site in 2009 with links you can click in case you missed them.

1. Differentiation vs Competition and How to Achieve it.
2. Are Marketing People Needed in Selling SaaS Solutions
3. Recruiting SaaS B2B Channels and Getting Sell Through
4. Sales Talent is Overrated
5. Ten Top Ideas for Improving Sales and Marketing Performance in 2010

We wish you health and happiness and success in 2010.

Mark Gibson and Robin Gibson

Ten Top Ideas for Improving Sales and Marketing Performance in 2010

Most sales professionals will be very focused on closing last minute deals in the popular end of year discount-fest enjoyed around this time of year by our customers. Most marketers will be considering how they can improve program performance in 2010 to generate more leads and build mindshare.

It's a bad time to be calling sales and marketing leaders to engage in conversations about improving sales and marketing performance in 2010, but when is a good time?

So instead of calling prospective 2010 clients, I'm posting a blog and sending a link with the top 10 things for sales and marketing leaders to consider in their planning for improved performance in 2010, with a link back to a landing page on our site to register interest in further discussion.

1. Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment: of all the productivity initiatives, this one is the easiest to implement, the lowest cost, with the highest payback as it drives inbound marketing messaging on the Website and elevates the standard of sales conversations with customers.
   
   
2. Territory and Compensation review: are you rewarding your sales team for the behavior you are seeking? Do you have top reps sitting on house accounts and easily making their numbers and potential new stars struggling to learn the business and open new business at the same time, are you under or over paying for performance?
   
   
3. Adopt Inbound Marketing: If your sales team is still cold calling, then your marketing isn't working and your sales team is wasting a lot of time; inbound marketing is a better approach to lead generation. Inbound marketing using HubSpot has potential to significantly outperform cold-calling and traditional telesales performance over 6-12 months and provide an ongoing lead generation annuity. If you enter 2010 with an Inbound Marketing Strategy using HubSpot, you will exit it richer in many ways.
   
   
4. Get into Social Media: in particular, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and if you are in Europe (Germany) XING. These tools will help you research, connect and engage prospects for your products and services.
   
   
5. Implement Lead Nurturing best practices: if you are a thought leader in your market, or an early stage technology company that has a potential for leadership, you need to nurture your leads with a program that educates, informs and engages over the year until they are ready to convert.
   
   
6. Get performance data: so you can benchmark your performance against peers in your industry. The most comprehensive sales performance data I have seen is from CSO Insights and by clicking here to taking this survey you will receive a free copy of the 200+ page 2010 Sales Performance Optimization Survey from more than 1500 companies, when published in January.
   
   
7. Align your selling culture with the way your customers buy: Did you know that early adopters buy differently from mainstream buyers? Failing to engage and win the early market with novel technology is the leading cause of death for start-ups and many killer-products and it's both a sales and marketing problem.
   
   
8. Implement a professional sales certification program for your sales team: We know that sales performance improvement requires deliberate practice of skill and technique, regular role-playing and feedback from experts. A one-off training event is a waste of money without a learning methodology that includes Performance Support, Coaching, collaborative learning and support from experts and sales managers and a certification event to drive behaviour to attain a minimum standard.
   
   
9. Review CRM activity and make changes to formalise your sales process to create pipeline milestones and transparency in the sales process, so that everyone is selling the same way and that buyer and seller are aligned and qualified at each transition in the process. If you haven't seen it yet, take a look at Landslide Technologies, it's the future of CRM - very cool!
   
   
10. Have a great holiday, enjoy your family and friends, get some well earned rest...you all deserve it; 2009 was the toughest year ever in our business.

To discuss any of the above topics and your performance goals for 2010, follow this link to contact Advanced Marketing Concepts Ltd.

Holiday Reads for Hi-tech Entrepreneurs, Marketers and Salespeople

I have read some really important books this year that expanded my view of the World and gained valuable insight and I wanted share my top reads in 2009 with you and include links to either Amazon or to my reviews. Please feel free to recommmend any of your favorites that have a base in science and serve to expand our understanding of the sales and marketing sphere.

1. Diffusion of Innovations, by Everett Rogers. The book that spawned a thousand books including Crossing the Chasm, Tipping Point and Why Killer Products don't Sell, - see review below. Compulsory reading for entrpreneurs, sellers and marketers of novel technology. Originally published in 1962, the 5th edition is published in 2003 and updated for the Internet. Interestingly Rogers in this update refutes the existence of a chasm between innovator, early adopter and early majority and states that it is a continuous variable with no sharp breaks. Start-ups that fail, typically have serious product positioning and marketing problems and fail to engage and sell early adopters. 
   
   
2. Why Killer Products Don't Sell, Ian Gotts, Dominic Rowsell. After reading his book I engaged and am partnered with Dominic Rowsell to include the insight from this work in my Sales and Marketing training courses.  Critical insights for venture investors, entrepreneurs sales and marketing professionals on the IMPACT Cycle and how how people buy and a valuable contribution to the growing body of sales knowledge. A short read, but one you will find yourself marking up and revisiting. See my review.
   
   
3. Talent is Overrated, by Geoffrey Colvin. For sales managers trainers and anyone involved in coaching or training, this is an important book. Citing a lot of work done by Prof. Anders Ericsson on the role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. It takes 10,000 hours or 10 years deliberate practice (out of your comfort zone, getting feedback from expert coaches) to become outstanding at anything. Anyone can be great, if they are prepared to put in the hours. Most people are not and this is explains why sales people get to a certain level of performance and never improve beyond it. See my review in Sales Talent is Overrated
   
   
4. The Nature of Technology, by W. Brian Arthur. I have been in the technology business since I left school nearly 40 years ago. That was an exciting time with the birth of the 7400 TTL series integrated circuits and having witnessed first hand the hundreds of thousands of technology platforms and products that have built on the Integrated Circuit. Arthur coins a new phrase to describe the advances in technology as "combinatorial evolution"; whereas in nature, evolution is biological and subject to the Darwinian laws of natural selection, technology evolves as a result of combinations of existing technologies and methods to create new innovations, the critical ingredient in the process is human knowledge and ingenuity. Good background for anyone in the business of innovation. See my review of The Nature of Technology
   
   
5. Inbound Marketing, by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan. We have been HubSpot customers for the past 12 months and HubSpot partners for the past 4 months. This is a "how-to" for anyone interested in Inbound Marketing from the people who coined the phrase and are building a very exciting company at HubSpot. By planning to implement all of the ideas in this book in 2010, you will capitalize on a phenomena that is rapidly changing the marketing World.  Simple straight forward ideas, well presented with numerous real-World examples. See my review of Inbound Marketing
   
   
6. Plan B 4.0,  Lester Brown.
   A little off the technology topic, but very important. If you don't read anything else this year, you must read this book. This book is about saving the planet and our civilization and addresses the major problems facing our generation, our children and generations to come; desertification, poverty, climate change, over-population, food and water. Brown has harnessed some of the best and brightest minds in thew World to pull together viable solutions to our problems. Read this book and get involved in the movement.

I'd be happy for you to add any books you would like to recommend. Please keep on topic which is to expand our understanding of the World in which we live and how science and technology are being applied to improve sales and marketing performance.

 

 

 

Aligning Inbound Marketing Messaging with Sales Conversations

The marketing messaging used in Websites and Blogs to drive Inbound Marketing leads, must be used to drive sales conversations with the gamut of prospects and customers, without salespeople having to translate it or figure it out themselves.

Rules for Inbound Marketing Messaging:

For a B2B Internet Site to be effective, there is more work required than simply selecting and optimizing keywords. Effective Website messaging and blogposts have the following characteristics

1. Crafted around the needs of target-buyer-persona
2. Illustrate how existing customers use your products and services to solve problems
   
3. Products/services are described around how capabilities are used to solve business problems (features and benefits are dead, stop using these terms!)
   
4. Integrate keywords and phrases into the body of the message
5. Appropriate keyphrase tags are included in all blog posts
6. Keywords used in the H1, H2, headings for the passage
   
7. Keywords incorporated into the hyperlinks that make literal sense
   

If we have been successful in our Inbound Marketing and Blogging efforts and are attracting inbound leads, buyers will manifest their needs in the following ways;

The Value-Offered or transactional buyer
Buyer: "I just need a widget, I have a fixed budget and need to get started next week."

The Value-Added buyer requiring help to implement what they need. 
Buyer: "We are looking for alternatives to our current in-house system and would like to meet with your team to understand your approach".

The Value-Created sale to an early adopter who has an idea, but needs help to assess the risks and to develop a solution.

In the Value-created sale, the buyer has a number of goals to achieve. There are many ways to solve the problem; the salesperson assumes the role of the consultant and creates an opportunity for a high value, mutually rewarding engagement. This type of engagement is typically discovered by sales professionals looking for opportunities to grow footprint in existing accounts, or carefully uncovered in consultative conversation as a result of an inbound inquiry.

The same messages used on the Website and in Blogs to drive Inbound Marketing must be used to drive sales conversations with the gamut of prospects and customers; sales people should not have to translate the message to connect with buyers, either on the phone or in person.

Rules for Effective Sales Messaging

1. Must incorporate buyer persona,
2. Must incorporate appropriate best-practice diagnostic questions,
   
3. Must relate how capabilities are used to solve business problems relevant to the buyer role
   
4. Must include proof points that are relevant to the buyer persona,
   
5. Must be built for purpose, based on buyer behaviour, i.e. the Message required to support value-created (consultative) conversations is different to that of a value-offered (transactional) conversation.
   
6. Must enhance sales productivity i.e. sales people will want to use the messaging until they have integrated it and use it unconsciously.

Conducting a Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment exercise is a pre-requisite for effective inbound marketing and in creating one vocabulary for the organization that is used by sales, marketing, pre-sales and support teams.

Also strongly recommend you read "Why Killer Products don't Sell", by Dominic Rowsell and Ian Gotts for more understanding on how people buy and why the need for different messaging tools.

Admarco Book Review - The Nature of Technology

W. Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology is an important book for technologists, entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, in fact anyone in the business of creating, marketing or selling innovative technology.

This book is an ontology of the process of technological innovation and is a major contribution to the understanding of the evolution of technology and its influence on our economy and civilization.

I write this review as a layman, from my perspective of the observer of technological change over 40 years in the computer industry, initially in engineering, then sales and marketing and for the past 5 years focused on solving sales and marketing performance problems in innovative technology companies.

There is a clue in the title as to the main arguments in the book and few others in the World have the background to conceive, advance and prove such a powerful argument in just 216 pages. Brian Arthur is an engineer, mathematician, system theorist, economist and more recently a diligent scholar of Darwinian evolution.

Arthur coins a new phrase to describe the advances in technology as "combinatorial evolution"; whereas in nature evolution is biological and subject to the Darwinian laws of natural selection, technology evolves as a result of combinations of existing technologies and methods to create new innovations, the critical ingredient in the process is human knowledge and ingenuity.

Once a technology is created, it is then subject to Darwinian evolution, whereby the innovation advances through refinement of its component systems and further innovation and addition, the weaker ideas discarded to become museum artifacts and the process continually advancing.

Arthur examines the development path that produced the steam engine, the jet engine, the laser printer, the development of radar, the cyclotron, DNA and many other innovations including the computer to create a logical and balanced argument that is self evident, yet until this book, was untold. He also cites the great thinkers on the subject of technology including Joseph Schumpeter, Martin Heidegger, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and Thomas Khun.

Written in a clear, logical and carefully constructed prose, Arthur reminds us that our economy is the sum and manifestation of our technology and that it is becoming generative with the accelerating rate of technological change. "It's focus is shifting from optimizing fixed operations into creating new combinations, new configurable offerings." For high-technology entrepreneurs in startups, he captures the problems of both the innovator and the investor; 

• he doesn't know if the new technology will work
• nor how well it will be received,
• who the competitors will be
• what government regulations will apply

"The environment around the launching of a new combinatorial business is not merely uncertain: particular aspects are unknown"

Finally he suggests that "in the generative economy, management derives its competitive advantage not from its stock of resources and its ability to transform these into finished goods, but from its ability to translate its stock of deep expertise into ever new strategic combinations."

Stimulating, thought-provoking and highly recommended!

 

Developing Rapport and Empathy to Emotionally Connect with Buyers

I subscribe to the New Scientist magazine because each week articles are published from the fields of pyschology, neuroscience and behavioral science on the understanding of human behavior.

From these insights we marketers and salespeople can create programs that help us connect products and ideas with audiences and help salespeople connect with buyers.

A review of Marco Iacoboni’s book “Mirroring People”, in the April 2008 edition led me to the science underlying rapport and empathy. Sales trainers have for some time taught salespeople the value of matching and mirroring in developing rapport, without necessarily understanding how or why it worked.

We now have the scientific proof of the existence and role of mirror neurons in the brain through the work in neuroscience by Iacoboni et al and these insights are very useful in selling and telesales.

The following is an excerpt from our "Selling in the Internet Age" eLearning program on developing rapport and will be of interest to customer-facing professionals, whether in sales, technical support, marketing or PR.

Physiology Mirroring

We know that human beings are hard-wired for rapport and empathy through the work of "The Parma Five", Italian neuroscientists Giacomo Rizzolatti, Marco Iacoboni and others form the University of Parma in Italy, who discovered the existence of mirror neurons in the brain and that humans can detect subtle shifts in emotion in others through their voice, physiology, movement and facial expression.
 
We also know through the work of Dr. William Condon and others who studied videotapes of conversations frame by frame, that when we are in rapport, we mirror head movements, facial movements such as a smile, involuntarily and automatically and that this occurs within 1/15th of a second. Condon also observed that volume, pitch and speed of the people's voices matched each other within minutes as well as synchronization of breathing and general body posture.
 
The human face is an incredibly powerful part of our physiology in conveying our emotions. We know through Dr. Paul Ekman’s work on facial mapping that if we hold our face certain way we feel a certain emotion.

When we apply the findings of Iacoboni and Rizzolatti et al on mirroring we know that when see an expression of strong emotion on another persons face, we can "know how they feel" without having to make the face ourselves. This feeling is known as empathy and it is perfectly natural (except for those people with a type autism and are unable to experience emotion) if we allow ourselves to experience it. There is now scientific proof in the old sales adage "smile when you pick up the phone", it conveys warmth and that emotion is transmitted to the receiver.
 
To get rapport started initially in a face-face meeting focus on mirroring posture, head position, facial expression and energy level (breathing)….as well as matching the buyers volume, speed, tonality and voice patterns. When you are mirroring another person, wait for 2-3 seconds to mirror a physiology movement in the other person, remember it must be natural...you are just accelerating the process.

Rapport can be developed initially through mirroring and then through finding things in common with the other person. For this reason we suggest investing time in discussing non-business topics to explore common interests and background to create rapport opportunities prior to diving in to the business conversation.

The key take-away is that rapport is perfectly natural and develops unconsciously and automatically and as sellers, we need to be relaxed, but focused in front of buyers…if we focus on the buyer…not what we want to say next and go with the flow, rapport will develop automatically.

Warning, you’ve got to be subtle, mirroring must happen outside the buyers conscious awareness….this is not a version of the children's game of “Simon Says” and if the buyer picks up on it, then stop doing it.
 
By becoming aware of how others use their voice, language and physiology in communication will allow us to become much better communicators.
 
Follow this link to view this PBS Nova video program on the neuroscience of mirroring and an interview with Dr. Marco Iacoboni.

(the right image of Dr. Ekman is the real smile, note carefully the bags formed under the eyes and the more distinct cheek bulge)